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There are plenty of ways to tunnel under or through The New York Times's new online paywall, but if you're not careful about how you do it, the Times will shut you down.

That's what's about to happen to FreeNYTimes, a Twitter feed started to take advantage of one of the holes in the wall: While users are allowed only 20 pageviews a month before the wall kicks in, visits to the site via social media links are unlimited. As I predicted, this was an inducement for someone to simply tweet a link to every single story on the site. In this case, the perpetrator seems to be a web developer who used the Times's own API (application programming interface) to automate the process.

It's clever, but it's not kosher.
"We have asked Twitter to disable this feed as it is in violation of our trademark," says a Times spokeswoman. She adds that the paper has been monitoring and has already blown the whistle on other violations. Guess this won't be my ticket to easy paywall beating.

I also asked her about NYTClean, a bookmark that defeats the paywall with the aid of four lines of code. The response: "As we have said previously, as with any paid product, we expect that there will be some percentage of people who will find ways around our digital subscriptions. We will continue to monitor the situation but plan no changes to the programming or paywall structure in advance of our global launch on March 28th."